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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Bookish, bartered, and betrayed: few girls, even in the British Royal Family, were as hounded as Lady Jane Grey. Almost three hundred years after her execution, Charles Dickens, who made a specialty of exploited children, wrote that the English axe "never struck so cruel and so vile a blow." Jane was a cousin of Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII. As Edward lay dying, he tried to secure the legacy of his father's Reformation by making Jane, an ardent Protestant, queen. She was fifteen. The scheme failed--her reign lasted nine days, the shortest of any British monarch--and she was held in the Tower of London. The icy morning of her death, in February, 1554, Jane watched from a window as the headless corpse of her husband, Guilford Dudley, returned from Tower Hill in a cart. On the scaffold, she asked for forgiveness in accepting the crown but maintained her innocence in the plot that had resulted in her succession. She recited the Fifty-first Psalm--"Let the bones you have crushed rejoice"--and asked the executioner to kill her quickly. Her nurses shrank back, in tears. Jane, blindfolded, knelt and groped for the block, asking, "What shall I do? Where is it?"
A Jane Grey cult has lingered for centuries. (Recently, under the heading "Pleading Jane's Case," the Telegraph of London printed a letter suggesting that her bones be moved from the Tower, where she was buried unceremoniously next to Anne Boleyn, to Westminster Abbey.) Her life was dramatized in 1694, by John Banks, as "The Innocent Usurper," and in 1715, by Nicholas Rowe, the author of "Tamerlane"; both used her example to try to refute the claims of the Catholic pretender, James II. In 1809, Francis Hodgson, a poet and a friend of Lord Byron's, published a book about Jane which emphasized her virtue and piety. Similar books followed in the Victorian era--in 1853, David W. Bartlett wrote so that readers might "imitate the character" of this "beautiful and illustrious woman." Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of "The Secret Garden," used Jane's story twice, in her novels "The Shuttle" ("Not a man near who dared utter a word of pity") and "The Lost Prince." Dylan and the Rolling Stones both referred to her in songs ("Queen Jane Approximately" and "Lady Jane"). She has been portrayed three times on the screen--most recently by Helena Bonham Carter, in Trevor Nunn's 1986 "Lady Jane." In 2003, a librarian in Concrete, Washington, was discovered moonlighting as a dominatrix under the name Lady Jane Grey. This summer, when I asked Sarah Martin, the lead singer of the Texas folk-rock band Lady Jane Grey, how the group chose the name, she told me, "She was a teen-age martyr. She was spiritual, and we are, too."
Other "wronged" royals have their devotees--Mary, Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and, chief among them, Diana, Princess of Wales. But when people think of Diana, they see her--the shy half wave from the carriage, the glamorous evenings out--in photographs so prized that they led to her death. Jane Grey, though, is the only English monarch since Henry VII for whom no contemporary image is known to exist. (A portrait is mentioned in a 1590 inventory, but it has never been conclusively identified.) The blank where her face should be has made it that much easier for succeeding generations to imprint their political and personal fantasies on her. However, in the past two years two purported images of her have appeared--one in New Haven and the other in a...
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